Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Electro-shocking gamers to explore fear

This would certainly have made the average arcade game a bit more exciting. Last week's edition of Science has an interesting paper about combining a Pac-Man-like computer game and electric shocks to explore the way the human brain responds to fear.

Researchers at University College London asked volunteers to play a simple computer game that involved controlling a little blue triangle around a maze while avoiding a "predatory" red circle.

It does sound pretty similar to Pac-Man, although obviously without those tasty pills that Pac-Man was so fond of. Another important difference was that each player was hooked up to a device that delivered an electric shock whenever their triangle got caught.

The idea was to enhance a player's sense fear. As volunteers played the game, MRI scans revealed the most highly activated areas of their brain.

As long as the predatory red circle remained some way away, scans showed most activity in the prefrontal cortex - an area associated with planning and strategy. However, as the circle got much closer, the primitive midbrain became more active. The researchers say this highlights two distinctive stages to fear....

"Higher cortical systems control behaviour when the degree of threat is appraised as non–life-endangering and guides the organism to choose the most effective and resourceful strategy," the researchers write in their paper. "At extreme levels of threat, the [midbrain] may in turn inhibit more complex control processes when a fast and indeed obligatory response is required."

It's an interesting experiment. Perhaps the results could eventually feed back into game design too, resulting in games that know just how to play on your fears.